Previews

Bionic Commando

Capcom swings into action at GDC by showing off its new-and-improved Bionic Commando sequel.

Spiffy:

Swinging mechanic looks fun; solid graphics and animations.

Iffy:

Too early to tell how well-balanced the open-ended levels might be.

You can't keep a good commando down, especially when he's got a bionic arm with a grappling hook attached to it. Capcom is resurrecting the classic platformer Bionic Commando with an all-new game for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, and we were treated to a brief demo of a few levels of the game by producer Ben Judd at this year's Game Developers Conference.

As you might have guessed, Capcom isn't spending loads of money creating an all-new 2D side-scroller (although a game based on the NES classic is being prepared for a spring release on Xbox Live Arcade). This latest Commando is a third-person action-adventure being developed by Swedish developer GRIN, most recently responsible for the PC versions of the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games.

Set ten years after the last game, America has suffered a massive depression and the country has fractured. A new country called the Federal States of America has emerged. Your character, Nathan Spencer (we're not sure if he's officially related to the Radd Spencer of the classic title) is initially sent to do some recon work before finding himself in far more dangerous situations.

Despite the new perspective, the main hook for your character remains, literally, his hook. Your left arm has been replaced with a bionic arm and a grappling hook, which allows you to swing almost anywhere, not unlike the recent Spider-Man games. In early levels there won't be a ton of vertical architecture, so you'll have time to get the hang of swinging around a city or over chasms and such.

As we were eventually shown, there's a variety of cool stuff possible with the grappling hook. Everything is physics-based, so you can swing back and forth and build momentum in any direction you choose. You can hook certain items in the environment, like medium-sized rocks (they'll have a subtle highlight to indicate they're interactive), and fling them at enemies. You can also perform special moves on enemies like the zip-kick, where you attach your grapple to an enemy, reel yourself in quickly and give them a good kick in the face when you land.

The main level shown was set in a jungle area, and came across as sort of a mix of Spider-Man and Far Cry, with lots of open-area swinging from tree to tree, occasionally dropping down to shoot bad guys. Yep, there's shooting, too, although it didn't look nearly as much fun as swinging around with the bionic arm. As Judd explained, so much time and effort went into getting the swinging mechanics right -- which included the potentially controversial decision to let the main character jump (which wasn't the case with the 2D side-scrolling version) -- that the shooting aspects took a temporary back seat. Luckily they are now shaping up.

To finish out the level we were shown a boss battle against a biomech (described as the next evolution of your bionic technology) where you'd be bounced around if you tried to grapple the boss from the front. In this case, you had to do a lot of nimble jumping to let the biomech charge and pass you so you could grapple and attack from behind. We got tossed around quite a bit, needing to grapple a lot to keep from getting bounced into the water below. As it turned out, we were able to defeat the boss by getting him to run off a cliff. "Ring out!" Judd cheered.

As you progress through Bionic Commando, the game will offer special challenges, like "kill 10 enemies in a row" or "perform five consecutive swings." For successfully completing these challenges you'll get special rewards, which occasionally might include upgrades to your character. Although the game was demoed for us on a PC, all the controls were mapped around a standard Xbox 360 controller. One question that remains unanswered is if the PC version will support mouse and keyboard controls: we'd like to think it would, but considering Capcom's Resident Evil 4 port didn't feature mouse support of any kind, it's anyone's guess at this point. Bionic Commando is currently without any official release date, but it's a safe bet we'll be seeing more of it in the months to come.